Name: Julia Carolyn McWilliams
Born: August 15, 1912 in Pasadena, Los Angeles California.
Died: August 13, 2004 Santa Barbara California
Spouse: Paul Cushing Child
Parents: John McWilliams, Carolyn Weston
Occupation: Chef
Cause of Death: Kidney Failure
Interment: Cremated, Ashes scattered.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=9311948
Birth:
Aug. 15, 1912
Death:
Aug. 13, 2004
Television Personality. Legendary Television Chef. Born in Pasadena, California, and graduated from Smith College in 1934. Served with the Office of Strategic Services in Washington DC, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and China during World War II. After the war accompanied her husband to Paris where he was assigned with the American Embassy and started her culinary career, at the Cordon Bleu. With two French colleagues, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, wrote "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," which appeared in 1961 which resulted in the PBS television series "The French Chef" and was followed by several other series including her "Master Chef" programs, where she hosted 26 of America's well-known chefs. Published over nine books including "The Way To Cook," "Cooking with Master Chefs" and "In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs." (bio by: Fred Beisser)
From The Times
August 16, 2004
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article470112.ece
Julia Child
Television chef and cookery writer who decoded the mysteries of French cuisine for her North American audience
JULIA CHILD introduced gastronomically-challenged Americans to the ease of making cheese soufflé or cherry clafoutis — or even quiche Lorraine. She decoded the mysteries of French cuisine for a generation of American television audiences. It would be no exaggeration to say that Child, more than any other person, brought haute cuisine to America. She was a pioneer of television cooking programmes and the author of nine cookbooks, including the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking. When her first television series, The French Chef, was aired in 1962, audiences were immediately entranced by her scatterbrained nonchalance, as she careered about the kitchen in a seemingly haphazard and tipsy (but, in fact, well-rehearsed) performance of whisking, grating and chattering. Alternating between a throaty drawl and a regal trill, she spanned octaves, tossing off ad-libbed jokes to gloss over deflated desserts or splattered potatos. But while her delivery was folksy, her subject was
serious, and she approached it, the journalist Lewis Lapham, said as “a missionary instructing a noble but savage race in a civilised art.” And she did it with a patrician charm fine-tuned at a thousand
embassy cocktail parties. Child had her work cut out for her, given the hegemony at the time of prepared and frozen foods, as well as the vogue — in feminism’s early days — for “hassle-free” cooking. With a perfectionist’s zeal for detail, her 6ft 2in frame slightly stooped in a sensible tailored blouse, she walked her audience through cassoulet and coubilliac like an exacting but affectionate headmistress. Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born in 1912 in Pasadena, California. As a skinny, freckled redhead, invariably the tallest girl in the room, she was a popular tomboy prankster who challenged the boys in athletics. In a house full of servants, she took no interest in what were then called the “womanly arts,” scarcely ever entering the kitchen. After graduation from Smith College, Child lived in Manhattan and worked in the advertising section of a department store. She tried her hand at writing reviews, with little success, and had her heart broken by a young literature major. She returned to Pasadena and became, for a time, a self-described social butterfly. But by 1942, she had developed a keen enough interest in politics to move to Washington and enter government service. Turned down by the Wacs and the Waves, she eventually became a researcher and file clerk for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which posted her to Ceylon. There, she met Paul Cushing Child, an urbane, polyglot artist and OSS officer ten years older than she. After the War, the two were married in Pennsylvania, and when Paul was assigned to the US Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, Julia enrolled in cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu. She also gave cooking classes for Americans in her Paris kitchen and joined two French colleagues to research and produce Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was published in 1961. Well into middle age, with no professional cooking experience, Julia Child had launched her career as the American grand dame of French cooking. Her first television series, The French Chef, had at least as much impact as the book. The gangly Pasadena girl, it turned out, was a natural before the camera. Her biographer Noël Riley Fitch observed, “Changing Americans’ attitudes toward food would take decades, but the impact is undeniable: She celebrated her appetite, the joy of the kitchen, and the pleasure of food, a pleasure conveyed in the way she patted the bread dough and caressed the chicken.” Child continued to celebrate that prodigious appetite from her home and workbase, a fastidiously equipped but homey kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which she filmed her television series. Her recent series, Master Chefs, brought her together with other famous cooks to trade ideas and inveigh against the perils of America’s obsession with low-fat food. Butter and cream and meat, she argued were healthy in reasonable doses, because they brought pleasure. Famous among friends for what her husband called her “sleight of tongues,” — “I didn’t have my glasses on when I was thinking,” she might say, or “It was so noisy I couldn’t hear myself eat” — Child often had a gentle put-down for political or culinary fads and pretensions. She dismissed nouvelle cuisine as “just that Paris PR game.” Her husband, who died in 1994, was her greatest fan and supporter, and she often gave him credit for her success.Child was an active member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and a co-founder of California’s American Institute of Wine and Food.
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Name: Julia Child SSN: 081-07-6635 Last Residence: 02110 Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States of America Born: 15 Aug 1912 Died: 13 Aug 2004 State (Year) SSN issued:New York (Before 1951) Source Citation: Number: 081-07-6635;Issue State: New York; Issue Date: Before 1951.
Name: Julia C McWilliams Birth Date: 15 Aug 1912 Gender: Female Mother's Maiden Name:Weston Birth County: Los Angeles Source Citation: Birth date: 15 Aug 1912; Birth County: Los Angeles.
1920 United States Federal Census about Julia McWilliamsName: Julia McWilliams Home in 1920: Pasadena, Los Angeles, California Age: 9 years Estimated Birth Year: abt 1911 Birthplace: California Relation to Head of House: Daughter Father's Name: John Father's Birth Place: Illinois Mother's Name: Carolyn W Mother's Birth Place: Massachusetts Marital Status: Single Race: White Sex: Female Image: 1167 Source Citation: Year: 1920;Census Place: Pasadena, Los Angeles, California; Roll T625_117; Page: 17B; Enumeration District: 532; Image: 1167. Date Taken: January 15 & 16 1920
Julia’s Travels
New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 about Julia ChildName: Julia Child Arrival Date: 10 May 1951 Estimated Birth Year: abt 1912 Age: 39 Gender:Female Port of Departure: Le Havre, France Ship Name: Liberte Search Ship Database:Port of Arrival: New York, New York NATIVITY: California Line: 22 Microfilm Serial:T715 Microfilm Roll: T715_7979 Birth Location: California Page Number:2 Source Citation: Year: 1951; Microfilm serial: T715; Microfilm roll: T715_7979; Line: 22; .
Date Taken: Le Harve May 7, 1951
New York, NY May 10, 1951
1230 Hillside Ave
Pasadena California
Paul is also listed as passenger
New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 about Julia ChildName: Julia Child Arrival Date: 22 Jun 1954 Port of Departure: Le Havre, France Ship Name: United States Port of Arrival: New York, New York NATIVITY: California Line: 18 Microfilm Serial: T715 Microfilm Roll: T715_8468 Birth Location: California Page Number: 273 Source Citation: Year: 1954; Microfilm serial: T715; Microfilm roll: T715_8468; Line: 18; . Date Taken:
Date Taken: La Havre France June 8, 1954
New York, NY June 22, 1954
Address: Lumberville Pennsylvania
Paul C. Cushing was also a passenger
New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 about Julia Child
Name: Julia Child Arrival Date: 9 Nov 1956 Port of Departure: Le Havre,Fra Ship Name:United States Port of Arrival: New York, New York NATIVITY: California Line: 20 Microfilm Serial: t715 _8803 Birth Location: California Page Number: 179
Date Taken: Le Harve France: November 5, 1956
New York, NY: November 9, 1956
Paul Child
1776 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington D.C.
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The Newspaper Location: Boston, MA, Us Birth Date: 15 Aug 1912 Locations Mentioned in Obituary: Beverly Hills, Cambridge, Europe, Pasadena, CA San Francisco NY
Other Persons Mentioned in Obituary: Carolyn J. Sloane John McWilliams Jr. Harrison Chandler Paul Child Cushing Noel Fitch Riley Wild Bill Source Citation: Newspaper: Boston Globe, The; Publication Date: 19 Aug 2004; Publication Place: Boston , MA , Us..
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THE BOSTON GLOBE
Julia Child, a chef for everyone, dies By Sheryl Julian, Globe Staff August 14, 2004
Julia Child -- the author and television personality who endeared herself to generations of cooks, introduced her viewers to fine cuisine, and toasted them with a glass of wine and a high-pitched "Bon appetit!" -- died yesterday in her sleep. Her friends and family had gathered in Santa Barbara, Calif., to celebrate her 92d birthday, which would have been tomorrow. She had lived in Cambridge for more than 40 years before retiring to California in 2001.
Mrs. Child, called simply Julia by her many fans, began a revolution of good eating that changed the way Americans thought about food. She seemed like an ordinary woman cooking on television -- everyone's favorite loopy aunt, dropping food on the floor, looking a fish right in the eye. She gave her viewers confidence, as though she were only a few steps ahead of their knowledge of cooking. Because of the show and her best-selling "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (1961), which she wrote with two French colleagues, the world of food began changing rapidly. Young chefs worked out of these pages, while home cooks labored over her meticulous instructions.
Mrs. Child had a 35-year career on public television and wrote 10 best-selling cookbooks. In the year "Mastering" was published, American food had hit a low ebb. Postwar housewives were enthralled with frozen and packaged foods, electric appliances, and speed. The meal on many tables was meat and potatoes with brown gravy. When Boston-based Houghton Mifflin rejected the "Mastering" manuscript, Mrs. Child kept the $200 advance and found Alfred A. Knopf and a talented young editor, Judith Jones, who stayed on board for "The French Chef Cookbook" (1968), written to accompany the television shows; "Mastering the Art
Mrs. Child's influence on chefs, home cooks, and young people interested in food was legendary. Hundreds of cooks across the country say Mrs. Child was their mentor. "She introduced us to French cuisine in a way that changed our eating habits and made us much more inquisitive and adventuresome in our experimentation with the world's cuisines," Martha Stewart, who once made an elaborate French confection on Mrs. Child's television show, said in a statement yesterday. Added Marion Cunningham, 82, the cookbook author known as the modern "Fannie Farmer": "She's the heroine of the cooking world."
For years, she had aspirations of becoming a great novelist. But when she was 37 and living in Paris with her husband, who was stationed there with the US Information Service, she attended Le Cordon Bleu, the cooking school, and found her passion. She spent a decade writing "Mastering" with Simone "Simca" Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and then returned to the United States as the cookbook was published.
"The French Chef," a PBS series that evolved from the cookbook, was one of the first cooking shows seen on television and, by any standard, the funniest. With little theatrical training but a natural affinity for drama and deadpan humor, Mrs. Child drew people to her. She turned out to be an improvisational genius with perfect timing -- a ham who mixed up expressions and invented her own words. "The very interesting
In her breathless speech, emphasizing phrases at the end of sentences, Mrs. Child taught her audience to "whoosh" egg whites, "wallop" steaks, and ignore anything that fell off the counter. "I have a self-cleaning floor," she confided to her viewers one day. Often she would say, "If I can do it, anyone can."
Her famously imitated voice was immortalized in 1978 by Dan Aykroyd in a hilarious chicken-cutting, blood-spurting scene on "Saturday Night Live." She showed the tape to guests and laughed along with them. Mrs. Child brought to television a lifetime of party-going, merriment, and far-flung adventures.
She never stopped her slightly outrageous behavior. In her mid-80s one night, sitting outside her house in Cambridge in a mammoth caged patio, someone opened a sparkling wine that had just been brought in. Mrs. Child looked down at her own glass, which was filled with white wine. "I'd love some of that," she announced, pointing to the sparkler. Then: "Just a minute." She noticed a potted plant beside her chair and tipped her wine into it. "There," she declared, "now I'm ready."
Overcoming mediocrityJulia Carolyn McWilliams was born Aug. 15, 1912 in Pasadena, Calif., the eldest child of Julia Carolyn "Caro" Weston McWilliams and John McWilliams Jr. In 1934, she graduated from Smith College, where she, by her own admission, had done mediocre work.
Tall, freckled, athletic, and spunky, she had hopes of writing for The New Yorker. She did a brief stint at Coast, a literary magazine in San Francisco in the late '30s. She rejected a marriage proposal from the Times Mirror newspaper heir, Harrison Chandler. Jobs at W.& J. Sloane furniture's advertising and marketing department in New York, then later in Beverly Hills, did not work out. She applied to serve in the Navy WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services, but was rejected. "I was too long," she told biographer Noel Riley Fitch. Mrs. Child was 6 feet 2 inches tall and wore a size 12A shoe.
Mrs. Child's foreign service career began in 1942 under William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services. She volunteered for India, where she met Paul Cushing Child, a man 10 years her senior who was worldly, artistic, and largely self-educated. She did not consider herself much of an intellectual compared to him; all she knew about food was how to eat. Paul Child had lived in Europe, spent a decade with a brainy and beautiful older woman, and considered the 32-year-old file clerk rather naive.
Both were transferred to China, where Paul Child began looking at her differently. As chronicled by her biographer, she had a staff of 10, coded information sent to agents, and took charge of a foot locker filled with opium for paying spies. She could also throw a party together in hours. They married in 1946, in Bucks County, Pa.
Paul Child did not like his father-in-law, and the feeling was mutual. The liberal son-in-law met the staunch Republican, and neither had anything to say to the other. Because of this, Mrs. Child turned away from her own family and the couple gravitated toward his twin, Charlie, and his wife. Paul and Julia Child never had children.
The Childs' first post together after marriage was Paris, where Mrs. Child fell in love with good food. She attended Le Cordon Bleu with 11 GIs. She met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle at the Cercle des Gourmettes, a French cooking club. Beck and Bertholle had published a little cookbook for Americans, and when they met Mrs. Child they saw in her the English-speaking partner they needed in order to expand their volume.
"Mastering" took 10 years to research and write. Mrs. Child carried the manuscript with her to Marseilles, where the Childs were transferred, then to Bonn, Washington, D.C., and Oslo. A Cambridge pen pal, Avis DeVoto, wife of the author Bernard DeVoto, brought the manuscript to Houghton Mifflin and then to Knopf, which gave the authors the handsome advance of $1,500. The book has since sold more than 1 million copies. Mrs. Child told an interviewer several years ago that she wrote "Mastering" because "I just wanted people to cook in the French way. It was the only fine cooking." Her food, she said, was "not haute cuisine -- just good cooking."
A great love matchAfter Paul Child retired in 1960, the couple moved to Irving Street in Cambridge. He died in a Lexington nursing home in 1994. Mrs. Child moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. close to her 90th birthday. She left the house on Irving Street to Smith College, gave her cookbook collection to Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, and let the Smithsonian Institution disassemble her kitchen and reassemble it at the National Museum of American History.
The Childs' relationship has been billed as a great love match, but he was moody, prone to melancholy and, in his senior years, bad humor. He did not love parties, but he fostered her career, prodding her, and helping her -- even washing dishes in television studios. When he did not like what he saw in a rehearsal, he could make withering comments within earshot of strangers.
"She and Paul came as a package, along with a number of volunteer ladies," said Russ Morash, 68, who was her producer-director for about 150 of "The French Chef" television programs. Morash says there had been no master plan to make a cooking show. Mrs. Child, he said, was very organized. He felt "like a baseball director. We prepared our cameras so we covered the action."
Mrs. Child earned little money for her first television shows. She had income from her mother's estate, so she donated her $200 public television fee back to WGBH-TV. The shows sold books, and earned the authors royalties from each sale.
Beck and Mrs. Child eventually bought out Bertholle. But by the second volume of "Mastering," Mrs. Child became frustrated with what she saw as Beck's stubbornness and lack of precision, she told biographer Fitch. Mrs. Child wrote her remaining eight books alone or with different collaborators.
But her personal relationship with Beck continued for many years. The Childs built a house in the south of France on the Becks' property and spent many months each year in Provence. Mrs. Child continued to go to the house, called La Pitchoune ("the little one") until her 80th birthday, when she went for the last time. The Childs also owned an apartment in Santa Barbara, Calif., near Mrs. Child's girlhood home, where she spent many winters.
Throughout her life, Mrs. Child loved a crowd, and though assistants tried to keep her fans from her, she was drawn to them, and they to her. From the many restaurateurs she had inspired to the home cooks she taught on television, a reverential group always surrounded her. She called everyone "dearie," and her large frame, severely bent in later years, steadied by a walker, still towered over most everyone.
When she was 87, she and Jacques Pepin held a seminar to promote "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home," a companion to the television series. When someone asked about using less fat in recipes, she sent the audience into fits of laughter when she pounded the table with her fist. "I hate health foods. If it says 'healthy,' I won't buy it. And I won't buy the 'other' spread." She never gained weight, she insisted, because she ate everything in moderation. "I don't snack. Otherwise, I'd be Mrs. Six-by-Six." Her favorite foods included McDonald's french fries and Pepperidge Farm goldfish, which she served at parties.
Her local stomping groundsAround Boston, Mrs. Child was both famous and familiar.
She did her own grocery shopping, chatted up the butcher whose shop was near her house, met friends at restaurants several nights a week, filled her big kitchen with guests, and stopped to sign autographs. She was often seen at Hamersley's Bistro in the South End. "She would march in, say hello to the person at the desk, and then go into the kitchen and introduce herself to the kitchen staff," said chef Gordon Hamersley.
She loved the limelight and only occasionally would tell a stranger who approached and asked if she were Julia Child: "No, but many people say I look just like her."
For years, she drove a little red car with a wooden spoon on the antenna, so she could find it in parking lots. "She had a VW Beetle, and she folded her 6-foot frame into it," said Barbara Wheaton, a Concord-based French food historian who met Mrs. Child in the 1960s and became a friend.
The car, Wheaton said, "had a sunroof and her head was coming out of the top." Once, Mrs. Child gave Wheaton the keys to the Cambridge house so Wheaton could use her impressive library, and extending the hospitality further, added, "You might enjoy looking at my files of correspondence."
Her office, on the second floor of the Irving Street house, where she lived for four decades, was overrun with books and letters.
Her husband's paintings, on the walls of the downstairs common rooms, together with memorabilia from their many years overseas, made the house old-shoe comfortable.
She hosted television crews for her shows for months at a time, allowing them to turn her dining room into a control booth and her kitchen into a studio. She offered the house to her favorite food and wine organizations for fund-raising receptions.
Cook's Illustrated founder Christopher Kimball would visit with Mrs. Child, "and the first question out of her mouth for everyone was, 'Where did you train?' " (Kimball trained in his own kitchen.) Kimball said guests at the Irving Street house had to prove their culinary mettle. He found himself shucking oysters, carving lamb, and making soup.
In the famous Cambridge kitchen, Mrs. Child's old Garland range anchored one corner and a wallful of French copper pots hung in their outlined places. Mrs. Child never made home improvements, except for installing an elevator in the back pantry for her husband when he was failing ("great for chilling wine," she announced after his death) and adding a microwave oven to a pastry pantry on whose walls hung hundreds of baking implements.
Guests were often surprised to find themselves eating in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder at the table. Mrs. Child shuffled around, her knees having bothered her since her teens. The real reason she did not like the dining room, she once said, was that she did not want to miss any conversation.
She liked to reminisce about all the fun she had during her life, and she never lost her zest for a great party.
One chilly night after a large crowd had left a reception she hosted in the big Cambridge house, Mrs. Child wandered into the kitchen and slumped down into a deep arm chair. She had seemed disoriented all night.
The guests were mostly strangers, and she had clung uncharacteristically to those she knew well. One of the stragglers ventured timidly toward her. Looking up, she perked up. "Good night, dearie," she said in that unmistakable voice. "Wasn't that fun?"
In 2003, Mrs. Child was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Her niece, Dr. Philadelphia Cousins, who was with her when she passed away, said in a statement that there will be no funeral, according to Mrs. Childs' wishes.
"In recent weeks," Cousins wrote, "she had been suffering from kidney failure, and on Thursday in her characteristically decisive way, she removed her oxygen mask, declined to go to the hospital, and closed her eyes."
Alison Arnett of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Julia Child, a chef for everyone, dies
August 14, 2004
Page 2 of 5 -- "The French Chef," a PBS series that evolved from the cookbook, was one of the first cooking shows seen on television and, by any standard, the funniest. With little theatrical training but a natural affinity for drama and deadpan humor, Mrs. Child drew people to her. She turned out to be an improvisational genius with perfect timing -- a ham who mixed up expressions and invented her own words. "The very interesting thing about her theatrical talent was that it was spontaneous," Jones said
In her breathless speech, emphasizing phrases at the end of sentences, Mrs. Child taught her audience to "whoosh" egg whites, "wallop" steaks, and ignore anything that fell off the counter. "I have a self-cleaning floor," she confided to her viewers one day. Often she would say, "If I can do it, anyone can."
Her famously imitated voice was immortalized in 1978 by Dan Aykroyd in a hilarious chicken-cutting, blood-spurting scene on "Saturday Night Live." She showed the tape to guests and laughed along with them. Mrs. Child brought to television a lifetime of party-going, merriment, and far-flung adventures.
She never stopped her slightly outrageous behavior. In her mid-80s one night, sitting outside her house in Cambridge in a mammoth caged patio, someone opened a sparkling wine that had just been brought in. Mrs. Child looked down at her own glass, which was filled with white wine. "I'd love some of that," she announced, pointing to the sparkler. Then: "Just a minute." She noticed a potted plant beside her chair and tipped her wine into it. "There," she declared, "now I'm ready."
Overcoming mediocrityJulia Carolyn McWilliams was born Aug. 15, 1912 in Pasadena, Calif., the eldest child of Julia Carolyn "Caro" Weston McWilliams and John McWilliams Jr. In 1934, she graduated from Smith College, where she, by her own admission, had done mediocre work.
Tall, freckled, athletic, and spunky, she had hopes of writing for The New Yorker. She did a brief stint at Coast, a literary magazine in San Francisco in the late '30s. She rejected a marriage proposal from the Times Mirror newspaper heir, Harrison Chandler. Jobs at W.& J. Sloane furniture's advertising and marketing department in New York, then later in Beverly Hills, did not work out. She applied to serve in the Navy WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services, but was rejected. "I was too long," she told biographer Noel Riley Fitch. Mrs. Child was 6 feet 2 inches tall and wore a size 12A shoe.
Mrs. Child's foreign service career began in 1942 under William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services. She volunteered for India, where she met Paul Cushing Child, a man 10 years her senior who was worldly, artistic, and largely self-educated. She did not consider herself much of an intellectual compared to him; all she knew about food was how to eat. Paul Child had lived in Europe, spent a decade with a brainy and beautiful older woman, and considered the 32-year-old file clerk rather naive.
Julia Child, a chef for everyone, dies
By Sheryl Julian, Globe Staff August 14, 2004
Julia Child -- the author and television personality who endeared herself to generations of cooks, introduced her viewers to fine cuisine, and toasted them with a glass of wine and a high-pitched "Bon appetit!" -- died yesterday in her sleep. Her friends and family had gathered in Santa Barbara, Calif., to celebrate her 92d birthday, which would have been tomorrow. She had lived in Cambridge for more than 40 years before retiring to California in 2001.
Mrs. Child, called simply Julia by her many fans, began a revolution of good eating that changed the way Americans thought about food. She seemed like an ordinary woman cooking on television -- everyone's favorite loopy aunt, dropping food on the floor, looking a fish right in the eye. She gave her viewers confidence, as though she were only a few steps ahead of their knowledge of cooking. Because of the show and her best-selling "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (1961), which she wrote with two French colleagues, the world of food began changing rapidly. Young chefs worked out of these pages, while home cooks labored over her meticulous instructions.
Mrs. Child had a 35-year career on public television and wrote 10 best-selling cookbooks. In the year "Mastering" was published, American food had hit a low ebb. Postwar housewives were enthralled with frozen and packaged foods, electric appliances, and speed. The meal on many tables was meat and potatoes with brown gravy. When Boston-based Houghton Mifflin rejected the "Mastering" manuscript, Mrs. Child kept the $200 advance and found Alfred A. Knopf and a talented young editor, Judith Jones, who stayed on board for "The French Chef Cookbook" (1968), written to accompany the television shows; "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II" (1970); "From Julia's Kitchen" (1975); and other volumes.
Mrs. Child's influence on chefs, home cooks, and young people interested in food was legendary. Hundreds of cooks across the country say Mrs. Child was their mentor. "She introduced us to French cuisine in a way that changed our eating habits and made us much more inquisitive and adventuresome in our experimentation with the world's cuisines," Martha Stewart, who once made an elaborate French confection on Mrs. Child's television show, said in a statement yesterday. Added Marion Cunningham, 82, the cookbook author known as the modern "Fannie Farmer": "She's the heroine of the cooking world."
For years, she had aspirations of becoming a great novelist. But when she was 37 and living in Paris with her husband, who was stationed there with the US Information Service, she attended Le Cordon Bleu, the cooking school, and found her passion. She spent a decade writing "Mastering" with Simone "Simca" Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and then returned to the United States as the cookbook was published.
"The French Chef," a PBS series that evolved from the cookbook, was one of the first cooking shows seen on television and, by any standard, the funniest. With little theatrical training but a natural affinity for drama and deadpan humor, Mrs. Child drew people to her. She turned out to be an improvisational genius with perfect timing -- a ham who mixed up expressions and invented her own words. "The very interesting thing about her theatrical talent was that it was spontaneous," Jones said.
In her breathless speech, emphasizing phrases at the end of sentences, Mrs. Child taught her audience to "whoosh" egg whites, "wallop" steaks, and ignore anything that fell off the counter. "I have a self-cleaning floor," she confided to her viewers one day. Often she would say, "If I can do it, anyone can."
Her famously imitated voice was immortalized in 1978 by Dan Aykroyd in a hilarious chicken-cutting, blood-spurting scene on "Saturday Night Live." She showed the tape to guests and laughed along with them. Mrs. Child brought to television a lifetime of party-going, merriment, and far-flung adventures.
She never stopped her slightly outrageous behavior. In her mid-80s one night, sitting outside her house in Cambridge in a mammoth caged patio, someone opened a sparkling wine that had just been brought in. Mrs. Child looked down at her own glass, which was filled with white wine. "I'd love some of that," she announced, pointing to the sparkler. Then: "Just a minute." She noticed a potted plant beside her chair and tipped her wine into it. "There," she declared, "now I'm ready."
Overcoming mediocrityJulia Carolyn McWilliams was born Aug. 15, 1912 in Pasadena, Calif., the eldest child of Julia Carolyn "Caro" Weston McWilliams and John McWilliams Jr. In 1934, she graduated from Smith College, where she, by her own admission, had done mediocre work.
Tall, freckled, athletic, and spunky, she had hopes of writing for The New Yorker. She did a brief stint at Coast, a literary magazine in San Francisco in the late '30s. She rejected a marriage proposal from the Times Mirror newspaper heir, Harrison Chandler. Jobs at W.& J. Sloane furniture's advertising and marketing department in New York, then later in Beverly Hills, did not work out. She applied to serve in the Navy WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services, but was rejected. "I was too long," she told biographer Noel Riley Fitch. Mrs. Child was 6 feet 2 inches tall and wore a size 12A shoe.
Mrs. Child's foreign service career began in 1942 under William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services. She volunteered for India, where she met Paul Cushing Child, a man 10 years her senior who was worldly, artistic, and largely self-educated. She did not consider herself much of an intellectual compared to him; all she knew about food was how to eat. Paul Child had lived in Europe, spent a decade with a brainy and beautiful older woman, and considered the 32-year-old file clerk rather naive.
Both were transferred to China, where Paul Child began looking at her differently. As chronicled by her biographer, she had a staff of 10, coded information sent to agents, and took charge of a foot locker filled with opium for paying spies. She could also throw a party together in hours. They married in 1946, in Bucks County, Pa.
Paul Child did not like his father-in-law, and the feeling was mutual. The liberal son-in-law met the staunch Republican, and neither had anything to say to the other. Because of this, Mrs. Child turned away from her own family and the couple gravitated toward his twin, Charlie, and his wife. Paul and Julia Child never had children.
The Childs' first post together after marriage was Paris, where Mrs. Child fell in love with good food. She attended Le Cordon Bleu with 11 GIs. She met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle at the Cercle des Gourmettes, a French cooking club. Beck and Bertholle had published a little cookbook for Americans, and when they met Mrs. Child they saw in her the English-speaking partner they needed in order to expand their volume.
"Mastering" took 10 years to research and write. Mrs. Child carried the manuscript with her to Marseilles, where the Childs were transferred, then to Bonn, Washington, D.C., and Oslo. A Cambridge pen pal, Avis DeVoto, wife of the author Bernard DeVoto, brought the manuscript to Houghton Mifflin and then to Knopf, which gave the authors the handsome advance of $1,500. The book has since sold more than 1 million copies. Mrs. Child told an interviewer several years ago that she wrote "Mastering" because "I just wanted people to cook in the French way. It was the only fine cooking." Her food, she said, was "not haute cuisine -- just good cooking."
A great love matchAfter Paul Child retired in 1960, the couple moved to Irving Street in Cambridge. He died in a Lexington nursing home in 1994. Mrs. Child moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. close to her 90th birthday. She left the house on Irving Street to Smith College, gave her cookbook collection to Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, and let the Smithsonian Institution disassemble her kitchen and reassemble it at the National Museum of American History.
The Childs' relationship has been billed as a great love match, but he was moody, prone to melancholy and, in his senior years, bad humor. He did not love parties, but he fostered her career, prodding her, and helping her -- even washing dishes in television studios. When he did not like what he saw in a rehearsal, he could make withering comments within earshot of strangers.
"She and Paul came as a package, along with a number of volunteer ladies," said Russ Morash, 68, who was her producer-director for about 150 of "The French Chef" television programs. Morash says there had been no master plan to make a cooking show. Mrs. Child, he said, was very organized. He felt "like a baseball director. We prepared our cameras so we covered the action."
Mrs. Child earned little money for her first television shows. She had income from her mother's estate, so she donated her $200 public television fee back to WGBH-TV. The shows sold books, and earned the authors royalties from each sale.
Beck and Mrs. Child eventually bought out Bertholle. But by the second volume of "Mastering," Mrs. Child became frustrated with what she saw as Beck's stubbornness and lack of precision, she told biographer Fitch. Mrs. Child wrote her remaining eight books alone or with different collaborators.
But her personal relationship with Beck continued for many years. The Childs built a house in the south of France on the Becks' property and spent many months each year in Provence. Mrs. Child continued to go to the house, called La Pitchoune ("the little one") until her 80th birthday, when she went for the last time. The Childs also owned an apartment in Santa Barbara, Calif., near Mrs. Child's girlhood home, where she spent many winters.
Throughout her life, Mrs. Child loved a crowd, and though assistants tried to keep her fans from her, she was drawn to them, and they to her. From the many restaurateurs she had inspired to the home cooks she taught on television, a reverential group always surrounded her. She called everyone "dearie," and her large frame, severely bent in later years, steadied by a walker, still towered over most everyone.
When she was 87, she and Jacques Pepin held a seminar to promote "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home," a companion to the television series. When someone asked about using less fat in recipes, she sent the audience into fits of laughter when she pounded the table with her fist. "I hate health foods. If it says 'healthy,' I won't buy it. And I won't buy the 'other' spread." She never gained weight, she insisted, because she ate everything in moderation. "I don't snack. Otherwise, I'd be Mrs. Six-by-Six." Her favorite foods included McDonald's french fries and Pepperidge Farm goldfish, which she served at parties.
Her local stomping groundsAround Boston, Mrs. Child was both famous and familiar.
She did her own grocery shopping, chatted up the butcher whose shop was near her house, met friends at restaurants several nights a week, filled her big kitchen with guests, and stopped to sign autographs. She was often seen at Hamersley's Bistro in the South End. "She would march in, say hello to the person at the desk, and then go into the kitchen and introduce herself to the kitchen staff," said chef Gordon Hamersley.
She loved the limelight and only occasionally would tell a stranger who approached and asked if she were Julia Child: "No, but many people say I look just like her."
For years, she drove a little red car with a wooden spoon on the antenna, so she could find it in parking lots. "She had a VW Beetle, and she folded her 6-foot frame into it," said Barbara Wheaton, a Concord-based French food historian who met Mrs. Child in the 1960s and became a friend.
The car, Wheaton said, "had a sunroof and her head was coming out of the top." Once, Mrs. Child gave Wheaton the keys to the Cambridge house so Wheaton could use her impressive library, and extending the hospitality further, added, "You might enjoy looking at my files of correspondence."
Her office, on the second floor of the Irving Street house, where she lived for four decades, was overrun with books and letters.
Her husband's paintings, on the walls of the downstairs common rooms, together with memorabilia from their many years overseas, made the house old-shoe comfortable.
She hosted television crews for her shows for months at a time, allowing them to turn her dining room into a control booth and her kitchen into a studio. She offered the house to her favorite food and wine organizations for fund-raising receptions.
Cook's Illustrated founder Christopher Kimball would visit with Mrs. Child, "and the first question out of her mouth for everyone was, 'Where did you train?' " (Kimball trained in his own kitchen.) Kimball said guests at the Irving Street house had to prove their culinary mettle. He found himself shucking oysters, carving lamb, and making soup.
In the famous Cambridge kitchen, Mrs. Child's old Garland range anchored one corner and a wallful of French copper pots hung in their outlined places. Mrs. Child never made home improvements, except for installing an elevator in the back pantry for her husband when he was failing ("great for chilling wine," she announced after his death) and adding a microwave oven to a pastry pantry on whose walls hung hundreds of baking implements.
Guests were often surprised to find themselves eating in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder at the table. Mrs. Child shuffled around, her knees having bothered her since her teens. The real reason she did not like the dining room, she once said, was that she did not want to miss any conversation.
She liked to reminisce about all the fun she had during her life, and she never lost her zest for a great party.
One chilly night after a large crowd had left a reception she hosted in the big Cambridge house, Mrs. Child wandered into the kitchen and slumped down into a deep arm chair. She had seemed disoriented all night.
The guests were mostly strangers, and she had clung uncharacteristically to those she knew well. One of the stragglers ventured timidly toward her. Looking up, she perked up. "Good night, dearie," she said in that unmistakable voice. "Wasn't that fun?"
In 2003, Mrs. Child was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Her niece, Dr. Philadelphia Cousins, who was with her when she passed away, said in a statement that there will be no funeral, according to Mrs. Childs' wishes.
"In recent weeks," Cousins wrote, "she had been suffering from kidney failure, and on Thursday in her characteristically decisive way, she removed her oxygen mask, declined to go to the hospital, and closed her eyes."
Alison Arnett of the Globe staff contributed
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Name: Paul Cushing Child
Born: January 15, 1902 in Montclair, New Jersey.
Died: May 12, 1994 Fair Lawn Nursing Home Lexington Suffolk County Massachusetts
Spouse: Julia Carolyn McWilliams
Parents: Charles Tripler Childs, Bertha May Cushing
Occupation: foreign-service officer, artist
Cause of Death: Heart failure
Interment: Unknown
Burial:Cremated, Ashes given to family or friend.
Birth: 1902
Death: 1994
Intelligence Officer and gourmand. Served with Office of Strategic Services during
WWII, later with U.S. Information Service. Husband of popular television chef, Julia McWillians Child. Paul Child was a worldly, artistic, largely self-educated man with a bleak traumatic childhood with no father and a struggling mother. He was said to have the "precise, almost effete, speech of an aesthete." He was also known as an urbane artist and epicurean; turned OSS mapmaker for the Office of Strategic Services which was setting up bases around the world. In July 1944, Paul met Julia McWilliams; he was a "one-man art factory," as she called him, who was 10 years her senior and quite sophisticated. He worked closely with the generals to set up the various war rooms, creating maps, drawings, and photography for the OSS's Presentation Department. She was enamored of Paul, but he was looking for a princess. It would be a while before Paul recognized that he preferred a lion. By March 1945, the OSS had moved to China wehre the base of operations was first Kunming, then Chongqing (Chungking), which was the free capital. Both Julia and Paul spent time in Kunming and Chongqing. In Kunming Julia set up a file system, employing her now well-regarded efficiency and tact. There were difficulties coordinating and directing the complex machinations of the rival Chinese leaders, the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. According to Paul, "Julia was privy to all messages, both incoming from the field, or Washington, etcetera, and outgoing to our agents and operatives all over China-Burma-India." Back in the states, Paul and Julia wanted to solidify their commitment by getting married. Nothing could stop them, not Julia’s father who was at odds with the liberal-minded Paul nor the head-on collison the day before the wedding. Julia and Paul married in 1946 and then moved to Paris in 1948, where Paul worked for the U.S. Information Service, in charge of exhibits and photography. His assigment in Paris was finished in 1954; he was subsequently assigned to Marseilles, Bonn, Oslo and Washington DC while with the US State Department. As research began on Julia's first cookbook, Paul was the assistant, proofing drafts of Julia's cookbooks and giving endless feedback on hundreds of dishes. When he retired in 1961 and the couple returned to the United States, he devoted himself fulltime to Julia's TV shows and publicity tours, making travel arrangements, washing dishes and accompanying Julia on trips to the market. They laughed and held hands throughout all of it, and never, ever, did Paul want the spotlight to be anywhere but on Julia. He often referred to himself as “part of the iceberg that doesn't show.” If Paul supported Julia in practical matters, he always made sure to express his admiration and affection in romantic ways as well, often writing verse for his beloved that was full of humor and lighthearted lust. In 1961, Paul Child retired from the Foreign Service and gradually became his wife's road manager, agent, traveling companion and general factotum, washing dishes at her demonstrations if no one else was available. In 1965, the Childs settled in the Cambridge house in which Julia lived until 2001. Late in life Paul became moody and was occasionally disagreeable and near the end of his life he became very grumpy and distant. After several strokes, the linguist lost his ability to recall a word. After years of waning health, Paul Child left his wife alone at the table in 1994.
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Massachusetts Death Index, 1970-2003 about Paul C ChildName: Paul C Child Certificate: 035349 Death Place: Lexington Death Date: 12 May 1994 Birth Place: New Jersey Birth Date: 15 Jan 1902 Source of Information: Original data: State of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Death Index, 1970-2003. Boston, MA, USA: Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Health Services, 2005.
Social Security Death Index about Paul Child
Name: Paul Child SSN: 033-34-1504 Last Residence: 02110 Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States of America Born: 15 Jan 1902 Died: 12 May 1994 State (Year) SSN issued:Massachusetts(1962)
Source Citation: Number: 033-34-1504; Issue State: Massachusetts; Issue Date: 1962.
1920 United States Federal Census about Paul C ChildName: Paul C Child Home in 1920: Cambridge Ward 9, Middlesex, Massachusetts Age: 17 years Estimated Birth Year: abt 1903 Birthplace: New Jersey Relation to Head of House:Son Father's Birth Place: Virginia Mother's Name: Bertha C Mother's Birth Place: Connecticut Marital Status: Single Race: White Sex: Male Able to read: Yes Able to Write: Yes Image:1019 SourceCitation: Year: 1920;Census Place: Cambridge Ward 9, Middlesex, Massachusetts; Roll T625_708; Page: 2B; Enumeration District: 87; Image: 1019.
Date Taken: January 3, 1920
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TravelNew York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 about Paul C Child
Name: Paul C Child Arrival Date: 6 Apr 1938 Estimated Birth Year: abt 1902 Age: 36 Gender:Male Port of Departure: Hamilton, Bermuda Ship Name: Monarch of Bermuda Port of Arrival:New York, New York NATIVITY: New Jersey Line: 7 Microfilm Serial: T715 Microfilm Roll:T715_6136 Birth Location: New Jersey Birth Location Other: Montclair Page Number:106 Port Arrival State: New York Port Arrival Country: United States Source Citation: Year: 1938; Arrival: New York , United States; Microfilm serial: T715; Microfilm roll: T715_6136; Line: 7; . Date Taken: April 6,1938
New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 about Paul Child
Name: Paul Child Arrival Date: 22 Jun 1954 Port of Departure: Le Havre, France Ship Name:United States Port of Arrival: New York, New York NATIVITY: New Jersey Line: 17 Microfilm Serial: T715 Microfilm Roll: T715_8468 Birth Location: New Jersey Page Number:273 Source Citation: Year: 1954; Microfilm serial: T715; Microfilm roll: T715_8468; Line: 17; .
Date Taken: La Havre France June 8, 1954
New York, NY June 22, 1954
Julia Child is also passenger on this Ship
New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 about Paul Child
Name: Paul Child Arrival Date: 9 Nov 1956 Port of Departure: Le Havre,Fra Ship Name:United States Port of Arrival: New York, New York NATIVITY: New Jersey Line: 19 Microfilm Serial: t715 Microfilm Roll: t715_8803 Birth Location: New Jersey Page Number:179 Source Citation: Year: 1956; Microfilm serial: t715; Microfilm roll: t715_8803; Line: 19; .
Date Taken: Le Harve France: November 5, 1956
New York, NY: November 9, 1956
Paul Child
1776 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington D.C.
Spouse: Julia Child
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PAUL CHILD , AT AGE 92 WAS ARTIST AND RETIRED FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER
Obituary-- Paul Child, a retired foreign-service officer, artist and husband of Julia Child, America's quintessential television chef, died on Thursday at the Fairlawn Nursing Home in Lexington, Mass. A longtime resident of Cambridge, he was 92.
He had been ill for a long time, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Child said. Mr. Child was born in Montclair, N.J. He was educated at Boston Latin School and Columbia College. He soon moved to Paris and pursued his interest in art, working in such diverse media as drawing, etching, painting and woodcarving.
He then had a 20-year career as a tutor and teacher near Venice, at a private American school in France and the Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut. His subjects were painting, photography, English, French and judo, in which he was a black belt, fourth class.
He joined the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and was posted to Washington, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and China. His task was to design war rooms for American and British general staffs. Curiosity About Food
Mr. Child was heading a chart-making unit in Ceylon when he met Julia McWilliams, who also had become a member of the O.S.S., precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. In China together, they sampled the restaurants of Chungking and Kunming and developed a shared curiosity about food. They were married in 1946.
After the war, he was assigned to the United States Information Agency, which sent them to Paris for nearly five years. There, Mrs. Child took up cooking in earnest. Mr. Child was also stationed in Marseilles, Bonn (where he became familiar with German wines) and Oslo. He retired from Government service in 1961.
The couple then settled in Cambridge, largely for its intellectual atmosphere, and Mr. Child collaborated with his wife in the design of her amply appointed kitchen. He became the master of the Childs' wine cellar and supplied photographs and illustrations for her cookbooks.
He was also a poet whose works celebrated Mrs. Child, his favorite subject. He had intended to live solely as an artist in retirement, but spent a good deal of time on her television show once the original "French Chef" went on the air in the winter of 1963.
Besides his wife, he is survived by many nieces and nephews.
Photo: Paul Child (Arthur Grace, 1975)
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/14/obituaries/paul-child-artist-dies-at-92.html
Married: September 1, 1946 Buck County Pennsylvania
Source: Boston Globe May 14, 1994
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Julia: August 13, 2004 in Montecito near Santa Barbara, California at the age of 91 of kidney failure. Julia died in her sleep at her home just two days before her 92nd birthday.
Paul: May 12, 1994 at the age of 92 at the Fairlawn Nursing Home in Lexington, Massachusetts.
How Julia and Paul Met:
Paul and Julia met in the summer of 1944 while they were both stationed in Ceylon. Paul was 41 and Julia was 31.
"... during her time of service, she [Julia] met her husband. Paul Child was also an OSS officer. He was well traveled, and it was he who opened Julia’s eyes to appreciate fine French cuisine. The two married in September 1946."Source: "A Look Back ... Julia Child: Life Before French Cuisine",
CIA.gov
Julia: "We were based at a lovely old tea plantation, and I could look out my office window into Paul's office. I was still unformed. He was ten years older than me and worldly; he courted various other women there, but we slowly warmed up to each other."Source: Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. My Life in France. 2006. pg. 118.
Wedding Date:
A day before their wedding, Paul and Julia were in an automobile accident. Julia wrote that they were "a bit banged up." Paul and Julia were married on September 1, 1946 in Washington, D.C. They did not have a honeymoon.
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Children:
Julia and Paul did not have any children.
OccupationsJulia: Although Julia reportedly didn't cook until she married Paul when she was 34, she was an award winning chef, cooking expert, television personality, author
(compare prices), advertising copywriter, and a civilian employee of Office of Strategic Services
(OSS).
On August 14, 2008, the National Archives released previously classified 750,000 pages that identified a "vast spy network of military and civilian operatives ... [Julia] served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt."
Paul: Artist, cartographer, teacher, photographer, member of the diplomatic service, and poet. Paul was a gourmet and loved fine cuisine. He did photography and illustrations for Julia's books.
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Residences:
When not traveling, Paul and Julia lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in La Pitchoune, a country house they built in Provence, France. The couple spent their winters in the Santa Barbara area for many years.
Their home in Cambridge at 103 Irving Street was built in 1889. The 6,000-square-foot
"clapboard folk-Victorian" home has 3 floors, a finished basement, 5 bedrooms, 4 full baths, 2 half baths, a large dining room, family room, double parlor, and a kitchen with a breakfast area.
In 2001 Julia donated her house and office to Smith College when she moved to a progressive retirement community in Santa Barbara, California. Julia's
kitchen, with high counters designed by Paul for her height, was given to the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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Quotes About the Marriage of Paul and Julia Child
Julia: "But the first meal I ever cooked for Paul was a bit more ambitious: brains simmered in red wine! ... But the results, alas, were messy to look at and not very good to eat. In fact, the dinner was a disaster. Paul laughed it off, and we scrounged up something else that night."Source: Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. My Life in France. 2006. pg. 6.
Julia: "Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards."Source: Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. My Life in France. 2006. pg. 301.
Paul in 1967: "How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives! Each doing what he most wants, in a marvelously adapted place, close to each other, superbly fed and housed, with excellent health, and few interruptions."Source: Marilyn Mellowes.
"Julia Child." PBS.org
Julia about Paul: "Paul took letter writing seriously: he'd set aside time for it, tried to document our day-to-day lives in a journalistic way ..."Source: Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. My Life in France. 2006. pg. 8.
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Marilyn Mellowes: "... Paul reveled in his wife's success ... He underwent a coronary bypass. During the surgery, he suffered several small strokes. The strokes had affected his brain. He completely lost his French and verbal fluency. "Whatever it is, I will do it," Paul had said. He had acted as her manager, served as her photographer, tested her recipes, proof-read her books, and was content to let the light shine on her, not on him. Now, the man that Julia had counted on for so much would need her support in his struggle to survive."Source: Marilyn Mellowes.
"Julia Child." PBS.org
Julia: "Paul married me in spite of my cooking."Source: "TV's French chef taught us how to cook with panache." SFGate.com. 8/14/2004.
Laura Jacobs: "Though she called Paul a 'Cordon Bleu widower,' he wasn’t really. 'I would go to school in the morning,' she once said in an interview, 'then for lunch time, I would go home and make love to my husband.'”Source: Laura Jacobs. "Our Lady of the Kitchen." VanityFair.com. 8/2009.
Laura Shapiro: "Her new career crashed like a meteor into the center of their marriage. New roles sprang up and grabbed them -- she the star and he the support staff -- but they were determined to maintain what Julia called “that lovely intertwining of life, mind, and soul that a good marriage is.” “We are a team,” she often said. “We do everything together ... Whenever she talked about her career, she said “we,” not “I,” and she meant it literally. Paul attended all business meetings and participated in all decisions, helped rework the recipes for television, hauled equipment, washed dishes, took photographs, created designs and graphics, peeled and chopped and stirred, ran errands, read the mail and helped answer it, wrote the dedications in all her books, accompanied her on publicity tours and speaking engagements, sat with her at book signings, took part in most of her press interviews, provided the wine expertise, baked baguette after baguette, and in general made a point of being at her side on all occasions, professional or social. When he wasn’t needed, he disappeared happily into his own world, painting and photographing and gardening ... Every morning they liked to snuggle in bed together for a half hour after the alarm went off, and at the end of the day, Paul would read aloud from the New Yorker while Julia made dinner. “We are never not
together,” Paul said once, contentedly.”Source: Laura Shapiro.
"Just a Pinch of Prejudice." from Julia Child. BostonMagazine.com. 2007.
